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John Lasseter
John Alan Lasseter is an American Film director, Animator, Screenwriter and Film producer. He is mostly known for his work on the Toy Story films and is currently the Chief creative officer (CCO) of Pixar animation studios, Walt Disney Animation studios and DisneyToons. John was born on January 12, 1957 in Hollywood, California and grew up in Whittier, California. John’s father, Paul Lasseter, was a parts manager at a Chevrolet dealership and his mother was an art teacher at ‘Bell Gardens High School’. From early on, John was always seen drawing cartoons and encouraged by his mother, who was very supportive of him. Every day after school John would race home to watch Chuck Jones’ cartoons and when he was in high school he started studying the book; ‘The Art of Animation’ by Bob Thomas, which tells the history of Disney’s Animation and explains how Sleeping Beauty was created, this, and watching Disney’s ‘Sword in the Stone’ prompted him to make the decision for himself that he wanted to become an animator. In 1975, while John was attending ‘Pepperdine University’, which all of his family had previously attended, he learned of a new character animation program at the ‘California Institute of the Arts’ and ultimately decided to leave the university to fulfil his dream of becoming an animator and he enrolled at CalArts. 1976, shortly after starting at CalArts, he produced two short animations; ‘Lady and the Lamp’ and ‘Nitemare’ which both won the student Academy Award for Animation. In 1979, he began working at Walt Disney Animation Studios, where he suggested that Disney start making animation on computers, however, as Disney wanted to keep the traditional way of hand-drawn animation, his contract was terminated. In 1983, he moved on to join LucasFilm, the company that had created Star Wars, and at the time, was owned by George Lucas. When Lucas had to sell the company due to financial woes, it was acquired by Steve Jobs, whose contract had just been terminated by Apple. As LucasFilm had already developed Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), this was the perfect place for John Lasseter to delve into this new technology. Steve Jobs put together a team to develop and work at CGI and in the process, named this team P.I.X.A.R, with John Lasseter becoming the CCO in 1986. Over the next 10 years, this company would grow from a small computer company, that created animation shorts to creating full movie length animated movies such as; ‘Toy Story’ ‘A Bug’s Life’, ‘Toy Story 2’ ‘Cars’ and ‘Cars 2’, ‘Inside Out’ and many more. John Lasseter would help and oversee every one of these Pixar movies and associated projects as an executive producer and he also directed some of the movies. On January 24, 2006, Disney purchased Pixar and John Lasseter was given the rank of chief creative officer of both companies and he made the decision to rename the company ‘Walt Disney Feature Animation’ to the ‘Walt Disney Animation Studios’ that we all know and love today. Over a career span of over 20 years, John Lasseter has been nominated over 30 times, won 37 awards, including two Primetime Emmys, and one academy award, he even has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is married to Nancy Lasseter and lives with her and their five sons in Sonoma, California. They live in an amazing house that has many features including, a cinema and its own railroad model. John is known for always wearing a Hawaiian shirt and owns over 370 of them.